I don't think the objective/subjective split can be resolved by just looking at the words being used. That's because while we experience being part of a world with other people, life, objects and events, we also experience a world of inner dialog, imagination, dreams, memories and being in our own skin that nobody else can experience. Others can often infer some of our experience, and we can relate part of it to them in language, which is public, but it is still our own alone to experience. — Marchesk
Of course this is a rhetorical device. But to me the device in this context does appeal to a commonality of experience even as it insists that one's own is unique. There's something paradoxical going on. Your words propose that I will understand what you're proposing because I will experience things that way too. And I do! — mcdoodle
but it would seem that the "in here" isentirely public. Just as we know about the tree in our backyard, it would seem we can know when subjective experiences exists and their character. — TheWillowOfDarkness
what is the status of your experiences and language use? Are these merely "subjective" such that they have no objective important? Are we prevented form saying it is true you are experiencing something else? More to the point, how does anything we might talk about, which is a "something of our experience" true if our subjectivities don't constitute something which is true and can said to report truth? — TheWillowOfDarkness
One could say that the philosophical work is exactly in sorting out how we want to denote this or that -- in your example, the acceptable boundaries of use for the words "objective" and "subjective", or whether these or other terms are better. After all, what in the split needs resolving? What would it mean to resolve the split? Aren't the words "objective" and "subjective" simply being put to use, and insofar that we agree on their usage we have nothing more philosophical to talk about? — Moliere
I think eliminativism could mean that the folk terms used to describe our experiences aren't suited to a laboratory because they are rough stereotypes/social constructs. — JupiterJess
Btw it speaks to the victory of materialism/atomism/ reductionism that our direct experiences can be considered spooky when they are still our access point to the world. — JupiterJess
Science, having an objective methodology, is not suited to explain the subjective — Marchesk
Due to the various issues this split tends to raise — Marchesk
Why don't we live in a philosophical zombie universe? Why would there be subjective experience at all? — Marchesk
How could it spookily emerge from the dance of matter and energy? — Marchesk
I don't see how this is fundamentally an abuse of language issue. — Marchesk
Really, subjectivities (that is the presence of states of experience) are objective in the way assigned to "out there" in split — TheWillowOfDarkness
Btw it speaks to the victory of materialism/atomism/ reductionism that our direct experiences can be considered spooky when they are still our access point to the world. — JupiterJess
Aren't the words "objective" and "subjective" simply being put to use, and insofar that we agree on their usage we have nothing more philosophical to talk about? — Moliere
what I think is of disagreement in talking about whether a philosophical issue is substantive or not is over what counts as philosophical. — Moliere
To me then this whole paragraph adopts not a subjective nor an objective approach, but a sort of mutual approach, and that's often how we are. — mcdoodle
Science, having an objective methodology, is not suited to explain the subjective. Why don't we live in a philosophical zombie universe? Why would there be subjective experience at all? How could it spookily emerge from the dance of matter and energy? What is the world anyway? Is it a shadowy world of mathematizeable structures divorced from any secondary qualities, with exception of certain patterns of neuronal firings? Can we know this world, or only as we evolved to interact with it? — Marchesk
The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. (pp. 35-36)
I always see "spooky" in this context as a sign of prejudice and closed mindedness. The person asserting it is denigrating a set of solutions before giving them a fair hearing. — Dfpolis
You can relate to what it feels like to be me. Exist with the right experiences, you"ll feel the same. — TheWillowOfDarkness
To know your dreams, like anything, I just need the right concept. I could know what you dreamt without you even speaking to me. All I would need is to have the right experiences, to exist knowing the concepts which reflected your dreams. — TheWillowOfDarkness
I can know what someone experienced in the sense of "what it felt like." — TheWillowOfDarkness
I think it is a mistake to think that there is any subject-object split in reality. The only split is mental or logical. — Dfpolis
However we wish to categorize the matter, even in reality there is a difference between subject perceptions of the world, and subject-generated experiences independent of perception. Dreams exist in the real world, but they are still different from perception. — Marchesk
If I want to know what you felt like, I am always going to be using my experiences. That's the entire point. — TheWillowOfDarkness
If I think concepts reflective of the content of your dream, I'll know it. — TheWillowOfDarkness
I'm sympathetic to that. Notice that in these cases ordinary word use is based on faulty assumptions, and so getting clear would actually mean eliminating terms.
However, the laboratory settings is still objective, regardless of what better terms we come up with to use in place of the folk ones.
And from reading and hearing enough of philosophers like Dennett, it's clear that the goal is to eliminate the subjective as a real category, which is a lot stronger than replacing words. — Marchesk
. I could know what you dreamt without you even speaking to me. — TheWillowOfDarkness
What about psychology and the impact pharmacology has on the "subjective"?Science, having an objective methodology, is not suited to explain the subjective. — Marchesk
This is an example of your ability to multitask. You could not drive and daydream at the same time had you not gone through the effort of focusing your consciousness into learning how to drive. Learning anything is a conscious effort (and maybe an explanation as to why it evolved) and is another great example (along with pharmacology) of the causal link between the "external" and the "internal".The very fact that I can drive down the road on autopilot while I daydream about a day off at the beach is testament to the objective/subjective split. My hands, eyes and ears and nervous system are all still perceiving the road, but I'm experiencing something else, something not out there, but something generated by me. — Marchesk
From my perspective, your "in here" is "out there"" - part of that empirical space you mentioned - but, so are wavelengths of EM energy. I experience colors, not wavelengths. I experience your body and behaviors, not your mind.And yes, there is an out there and in here, in the sense that out there is the public, empirical space, and in here is the stuff created by my mind, even though both are part of the same, larger world. We can quibble over "out there" and "in here" being misleading metaphors, but it doesn't change the fact that my mind produces experiences which are not part of the public space, and thus there is a subjective world, and an objective one of our experience, however we wish to denote them. — Marchesk
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